We celebrate the incredible life of India's Bandit Queen, Phoolan Devi. Born on August 10, 1963, Phoolan lived a life of unknowable hardship and violence, where she was raped and violated for being a bold and outspoken oppressed-caste woman. Phoolan turned her life of tragedy into one of personal success, turning into a famed and feared dacoit, and even eventually entering politics to change the system from within. Phoolan's life cannot be understood without understanding the twin evils of patri

Phoolan Devi died 23 years ago. Like many survivors of sexual assault, reduced to epithets or hashtags, she too was defined by the most heinous incident in her life. But unlike most, she was much more: a bandit in her teens, a convict in her twenties, an MP in her thirties. Besides the multiple narratives binding her life, she told its different versions to different writers. They produced competing profiles across films, articles, and books—each presenting a different Phoolan. But how do the na